United Nations

When U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, one of the UN’s severest critics, addressed the UN Security Council on Jan. 20, 2000, his words struck most delegates as hostile: “If the United Nations respects the sovereign rights of the American people, and serves them as an effective instrument of diplomacy, it will earn and deserve their respect and support. But a United Nations that seeks to impose its presumed authority on the American people, without their consent, begs for confrontation and . . . eventual U.S. withdrawal.” Americans, Helms said, were moving away from “supranational institutions” and wanted no part of “utopian” international arrangements. Nearly every member of the Council rebutted Helms after he had finished. Ambassador Alain Dejammet of France remarked, “We hear you, but the idea in this house is that others must be heard as well.”

After Helms praised the “Reagan doctrine” for bringing freedom and democracy to the world without UN help or approval, Ambassador Martin Andjaba of Namibia rejoined that the doctrine had denied independence to Namibia, supported apartheid in South Africa, empowered the UNITA rebel movement in Angola, and caused suffering in Africa. Others criticized Helms for equating treaties with loss of sovereignty and for presuming that the U.S. could decide unilaterally whether to pay its UN dues.

On March 30 Security Council members visited Washington, D.C., and condemned the “ambivalent” leadership in the U.S. and its restrictions on UN finances. Replying to charges that the UN was an overbloated bureaucracy, Canadian Ambassador Robert R. Fowler responded that the UN Secretariat numbered only 8,000, while the U.S. Congress had 30,000 employees. “We have overlap and duplication,” he said, “and so do you.” In May the U.S. General Accounting Office praised Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s administration for having improved UN management and placed the responsibility for many UN shortcomings upon the General Assembly’s vague directives, resulting from the inability of member states to agree.

In early April Annan laid out an “absurdly ambitious” program for a millennium assembly. Besides reiterating the need for environmental protection, military interventions to halt genocide and mass murder, and curbs on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Annan praised imaginative efforts that states, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector were making to fight poverty and disease. He challenged UN members to cut in half the number of those people whose income was less than a dollar a day and who did not have safe drinking water. He endorsed a World Bank goal to improve the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020 and suggested cooperation with the pharmaceuticals industry to develop an affordable vaccine against AIDS and to reduce HIV infection rates among young adults by 25% in 10 years. He acknowledged that corrupt and authoritarian governments opposed these goals, but he hoped that developed countries would help by dropping trade barriers against exports from less-developed countries. He proposed that the UN establish an Information Technology Service to train less-developed countries to use the Internet for quick access to current medical information. Many of Annan’s proposals were adopted at the September 6–8 UN Millennium Summit in New York, the largest gathering of national leaders ever held. Annan praised their response to the summit’s agenda—to chart a new course for humanity.

War Crimes

On January 31 UN investigators implicated Indonesia’s military command and militia in a systematic campaign of terror and killings in East Timor (a former Indonesian province) in 1999 and recommended establishing an international tribunal to prosecute them. Indonesia insisted that it could conduct its own trials. Annan said that if Indonesia could conduct hearings and a trial fairly, there might be no need for an international tribunal, but on November 23 Mary Robinson, high commissioner for human rights, said that she had not ruled out convening an international tribunal if Indonesia did not follow through.

After long negotiations Cambodia and the UN compromised on April 29 to create an international court to try former Khmer Rouge leaders. In addition, foreign judges would be allowed to bring independent indictments. On May 24 the UN conceded to Cambodia the right to appoint one of two prosecutors, either of whom would be allowed to proceed with a case unless a five-judge panel (three appointed by Cambodia, two by the UN) objected.

In May Annan endorsed the concept of an international criminal court, based on a treaty signed in Rome in July 1998, and on June 9 France became the first Security Council member to ratify the agreement. Altogether 139 states had signed the treaty. On December 31, the last day on which the draft treaty was open to signature, both the U.S. and Israel signed, thus making it possible for them to participate in revising the text.

Though the Security Council voted unanimously on August 14 to establish a war crimes tribunal for Sierra Leone, it was left to Secretary-General Annan to recommend the details governing the court and to decide upon its composition and functions. The final plan, sent to the Security Council on October 5, gave the tribunal jurisdiction over anyone 15 or older but classified those between the ages of 15 and 18 as juvenile offenders, to be tried by a separate chamber and, if found guilty, to be sentenced to community service and to have arrangements made for foster care, training, and other forms of rehabilitation.

Health

The Security Council met on January 10 to discuss for the first time a worldwide health epidemic, AIDS. It asked the U.S. Congress to appropriate $150 million for AIDS research and prevention programs in Africa. On November 24 the UN calculated that 21.8 million people had died from AIDS and that an additional 36.1 million were infected with the HIV virus.

Carol Bellamy, the director of UNICEF, in mid-July called on countries and international institutions to launch a “war of liberation” against HIV in southern Africa, where 24.5 million of the 34 million carriers of the HIV virus lived.

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